Tag: Life

The difference the loss of a parent can make

Taylor Burian2 Comments

What did you wish was different about your childhood? How has that impacted who you are today?

I snagged this prompt from a site called Sage and Bloom on a post about personal growth and self-improvement, and this one in particular grabbed my attention not because it was near the top of the list (though that did help) but because it’s regarding something I don’t often talk about in general.

My biological mother died when I was about twelve years old. She fought a hard battle against cancer, but the medical research and financial costs of cancer care in the late 90’s just wasn’t like it is today.

So, the thing I wish was different about my childhood would be never having lost my mom as a kid. My two older siblings had more time with her, got to know her better, and saw their dreams supported better. I didn’t really get much of that, and my younger brother got even less.

I can for sure say that what I did get from her was my love of video games, particularly FPS and puzzle/room escape types of games. Her favorites, as best I recall, were Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3 Arena, Myst, Riven, Phantasmagoria, 7th Guest, and The 11th Hour.

The games aside, losing her caused me to become a little jaded and spiral through waves of childhood depression. Low effort in school and only wanting to be left alone with games because all I saw was some kind of futility to life.

I look back on the events leading up to her death and I see pieces of how her loss shaped who I’ve become today, but I also see how others were impacted.

My lack of a serious religious upbringing is mostly because my parents never kept a Bible in the house (that I ever knew of) and the fact that we relied on other families/friends to bring us along to church or church-affiliated activities, but nothing was ever really forced on us. Watching my mom struggle through to the end, and the things other people did around her, was what eventually reinforced where I am today in terms of religion and faith. Her best friend (the mom of my best friend at the time) had brought a pastor to pray with her for my mom. I don’t know what was said in her hospital room, I just know that they were in there because I could see them through the glass. Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, I would acknowledge it years later as a defining moment in why I am not religious. No matter how much they prayed, it wouldn’t change anything. My full belief as an adult is much more nuanced, shaped by a myriad of other things that I’ve seen or experienced thus far in my life, but I’ll leave that for other posts (should I get around to them.)

Another impact of her loss was how my relationship with my family changed.

Dad was always busy, working harder and harder to make sure he could provide for us, but after losing my mom he was also looking for a partner to help support him and vice versa.

My sister was always on the go and doing things but because of my childhood depression in middle school she was at one point roped into trying to help me in a therapy-like way despite the fact that she herself was still only in high school.

A lot of responsibilities fell to my older brother to support my younger brother and I. He had dropped out of college (although that was most likely for different reasons than just simply taking care of us) and was driving my younger brother and I to and from school, taking us grocery shopping, and ultimately spiraling into alcoholism fueled by his own depression. The events that would eventually lead up to all of our family living in South Dakota include some things that involve my older brother and his alcoholism, which shaped how I view alcohol (and a big reason I don’t drink.) Had our mom still been alive I’m sure things would have gone very differently for him as well.

As far as my younger brother goes, I can’t for sure say what affects came from losing our mom. Like I mentioned earlier, he knew her the least. I’m sure that our dad remarrying had a strong impact, but I can’t tell how it relates to the rest.

I’m sure I’m probably missing other things, things I just didn’t see or maybe things I repressed, but I’ll leave it there for today. Life would be majorly different if Mom were still here with us.

Accomplishments at different stages of growing up, and doing things out of order

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Yet another day where I have to come up with my own writing prompt because I’ve already answered the one provided! That’s okay, though, because that means I have to challenge myself with a little extra thinking about what I want to talk about.

As I was googling for writing prompts I stumbled on an image list with examples that gave me an idea. There were two in particular, not next to each other in the list but still related, that I thought might be fun to combine.

“What are five things you would like to do before you are 20 years old?” combined with “What do you think your life will be like when you are 30 years old?“

I’ve answered similar prompts before but I think I’ll twist it up a bit.

Did you get to do the things you wanted to do by the time you were 20? 25? 30? Etc.

The simple answer is no. There are tons of things that I wished I had done by various points in my life, but also so many of those things I feel like I learned about at the wrong time.

By the time I was 20 I was hoping to have moved out and started what used to be the stereotypical “college experience” of living on campus, meeting people and making friends that might become roommates when you’re no longer living in the dorms. Things like that.

I was still living and working at home (on the farm) until I was about 24. I moved out that year, living with friends for about five or six months, but was still working at home briefly until I finally landed an office job through my brothers. Ultimately, this period of my life, up through 25, felt like I was behind to a certain degree. I watched friends from college doing, more or less, the things I had hoped to be doing. Living in an apartment, working, doing fun things once in a while like occasionally going to the bars (drinking out is expensive, so not too often) or traveling for a short vacation. I did one thing, sort of, before 26, that was something I had hoped to do and that was go back to my home state (Colorado) of my own accord and on my own dollar. It was a short weekend vacation that I took to visit a friend (who moved there from South Dakota, where I met them and we went to college together) for their birthday. So, not all was “lost” in that regard.

Age 26 through 30 went much better, all things considered. I hadn’t expected to start this period of my life needing a major surgery and not having health insurance, followed by losing my job because the company didn’t renew our contracts, but that all happened, and helped spring me towards the direction of accomplishing some of those earlier things out of order.

Somewhere between 24 and 25 I had moved into my own apartment, by myself, but because of the cost of the surgery and insurance complications I had soon opted to move in with a friend from college that I had reconnected with the prior year. So, surgical debt, lost a job and started new one shortly after, which led to moving in with friends to help cut costs all around. Some of this happened only five years out of order from expectations, but hey, it happened eventually!

More things happened in that time before 30 that were closer to when I had hoped to experience them. Temporary gig work which helped get me into my current job, which is stable and has been a very good place to be long term. Making enough money to fund hobbies and enjoy new things, make new friends (which gets harder the older you get) and take brief staycations to play games or spend time with family. Still, all that aside, I didn’t meet anyone that I vibed with enough to start a solid romantic relationship with and explore the idea of starting a family. Another missed target.

From 31 until now, since I’m not sure what “accomplishments or experiences” I should be cutting off at 35, I have had some nice things happen. Still working the same job, still living with the same friend, learning new skills, making plenty of money for those hobbies AND I actually took a real vacation. Unfortunately, still no romantic prospects for me, but glad I’ve been able to watch other friends grow closer together and get married or start families.

So, while I’m not living the original stereotypical “American Dream”, I’m still slowly experiencing things that I hope for, just not always in the expected order. Looking at things from that angle, and then comparing my life to others, I am seeing the same thing for many others and accepting that my lived experience will be my own and shouldn’t be held to the same standards as others.

My biggest regret so far

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So, the daily writing prompt I received today was one I had previously answered. I didn’t want to use it again, and since this seems to be happening more frequently, I instead went searching for a list of prompts that I could pull from when this happens.

I found a list that will provide a new prompt each day for a year, and they’re listed by date so I can follow them in relatively close order as needed. Todays is below.

Explain your biggest regret – as though to a child.

Before I dive into the “explaining to a child” part, I want to provide a little context.

Socially, I can be a fair bit awkward. Less so as I’ve gotten older, but still awkward. I attribute this to the way society has developed over the course of the last hundred years or so, and the way that people are conditioned to exhibit and understand social cues. This is particularly important when it comes to romantic attraction, as that’s what I want to explain today.

As much as this may be therapeutic for me, I don’t want to mistake writing this out as a perfect alternative to actually speaking to a therapist (which I don’t have one but maybe should get one).

Explaining this might be hard but I’m going to give it a shot anyways, so enough stalling. On to the explanation.

You know when you meet someone, and become friends? Sometimes you eventually end up liking them a whole lot, but you’re afraid to tell them?

Why would you be afraid to tell them?

Well, you might be afraid that they’re not going to feel the same way back, and that maybe they’ll stop talking to you.

Why would they stop talking to you?

Maybe because they start thinking you aren’t who they thought you were? That what you really wanted all along is something different than they thought you wanted? And they don’t want things to change. They like exactly what you have right now, but they think that’s gone.

Why does that matter?

Because my biggest regret is never taking the chance to be honest about how I feel, about how much I really did like them and they stopped talking to me eventually anyway.

But why did they stop talking to you anyway?

That part is a bit harder to explain. Maybe I didn’t give them a reason to still talk to me as much and they started talking to other people more. They might have gone somewhere else that I chose not to go to, or that I couldn’t go.

Well, if they stopped talking to you anyway, then do you think it would have mattered anyway if you had told them you liked them?

It would definitely matter. Why? Because never taking that chance to open up meant never learning how to properly express how I feel about those people that I really like.

What do you mean?

Everybody is going to live different lives, see and do different things, and that means they’re going to experience different things. Including how they want to talk to other people, or how they want other people to talk to them.

I don’t think I get it.

That’s alright, it’s something you’ll learn if you keep talking to people and listening to them. And I really do mean it, listen to them and try to understand what matters to them. Don’t be afraid to tell people how you feel so that you can learn how they feel in return. Don’t be afraid of that chance that they might stop talking to you just because you don’t want them to.

Not sure if I explained that well enough for a child to understand, but I think I did my best.

I don’t resent myself or the other people in the few times I have opened up and been shot down, but in retrospect I do see things I could have either done better or acknowledged that I might have been seeing things through rose tinted glasses, which all added up to me opening up less often/take fewer chances to meet people I might have been romantically attracted to.

Another potential first time

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What could you try for the first time?

The last time I answered this prompt I talked about skydiving. Well, I still haven’t tried it, but it’s still on my list.

I think this time I’ll throw out rock climbing.

I’m not particularly interested in rock climbing, not the way I am about skydiving (one is, technically, much easier than the other) but I still would like to try it.

I’ve seen plenty of posts on social media of people doing indoor climbing, and I learned that they now have a sort of “treadmill” device where someone can essentially rock climb as much as they want without leaving the safety of five feet off the ground. I think, if I got the chance, I would very much like to try climbing on that device.

My defining principles

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What principles define how you live?

I’m going to keep things a bit simpler here and link back to a post I made back in May. In that post I talk about some words I live by.

The particular one I want to bring back up is my sort of “modified” Golden Rule.

Do unto others as you would have done unto you if you were acting the way they are towards you.

Bit of a mouthful and doesn’t really roll off the tongue, but I like it. It makes you think.

The reason I choose to live by this modified rule is as a safety measure of sorts for self-respect and self-esteem.

Kindness begets kindness, hate begets hate, things like that are part of the basics of the Golden Rule, but why should you show kindness to someone who is so clearly not going to reciprocate that kindness? If all I ever did was walk around being kind to people, then I’m likely to get manipulated and walked all over. So, instead, taking the Golden Rule a level deeper, I would treat them with the due respect I would like to receive should I be caught acting the way they are at that time.

If someone is acting like a complete asshole, I’m not going to just play nice and show them kindness, but I’m not going to be a complete asshole in return. I’ll be relatively polite but direct them away from myself without escalating the situation so that they don’t drag me down to their level because if I were in their shoes that’s how I would hope others treat me in return.

If someone is in need of help, I’d still help them to the best of my abilities, because I know that if I were in their position then I would probably want help as well. Provided that they don’t take advantage of the help and turn into a never ending problem of needing help. Then I’d do my best to help them get stable and make sure they’re able to take care of themselves beyond that situation, to be self-sufficient, because that’s what I would like to see happen for myself.

It should be that simple all the time. That’s what I believe and that’s how I try to live my life.

A year of progress since October 2023

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Since it seems like today’s daily writing prompt is another repeat, I’ll go into something else I was thinking about recently.

Today should be, I believe, the 362nd day in a row that I’ll have posted something to the blog. Given that I’m closing in on a 1-year streak, I decided to look into some stats. How many words have I written? How many posts? How does it compare to writing a full length novel in the same time frame?

Well, WordPress collects some of these things, but not in the way that I needed. So I decided to do some extra leg work today and check the word counts of all of my posts since October 16th, 2023 when I first started down this path of trying to write every single day. I’ll also be incorporating some numbers for last November’s NaNoWriMo, as proof of effort.

According to my calculations (I used Excel to help track all of this):

  • 371 individual posts written
  • 111,245 words just for the blog
    • 151,143 words when including NaNoWriMo 2023
  • 299.85 average words per post
  • 2,925 words in the longest post (although admittedly that was copying what I wrote for a writing contest)
    • 1,230 words in the longest post that DIDN’T include the writing contest results

That’s all I think I’m going to share, which is basically everything I was concerned with at this time (although, I totally did consider making some graphs.)

The key takeaway I want to point out, for myself as well as others who might be thinking of writing a full length novel (or two or three) is that even if you can only get down 300 words per day during some spare time, if you write every single day then you can definitely make it in a year and have the potential wiggle room for editing to bring total word count down to a reasonable level. Aim for that 100,000 word mark at just a few hundred words per day and you’re golden.

Good luck out there fellow writers!

That first grown up experience

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When was the first time you really felt like a grown up (if ever)?

This one’s hard for me to decide on. There are several different things that have happened that required me to make an important decision alone that would affect my future.

One that comes to mind was signing paperwork for college, as that dramatically shaped my future, but I was supported by family and friends in different ways when it came to the decision-making process. However, there is something that left a stronger impression on me as a “grown up” decision/event.

It was when I moved into my first apartment.

Up until I was about 25 or 26, I had lived with family or friends. It was easy, convenient, and we all benefited. The thing was, I didn’t have to worry about being in control of utilities, mortgage payments, or anything of the sort. I just paid in cash, bought groceries, or helped with things around the house (or the farm, when I was still living with my parents.)

So, when I first moved out on my own, that’s when things felt drastically different and more grown up. I was living by myself, no roommates, and I was solely responsible for making sure rent was paid on time and that my other bills/accounts were managed appropriately.

I had to be strong enough on my own to do these things on my own, that’s what I felt at the time, and that to me was what it really felt like being a grown up.

If I gave away money like this

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If you had a million dollars to give away, who would you give it to?

The simplest answer would be that I’d donate it to charity. Specifically, I’d donate it to one of the places in town that helps the homeless and displaced. It’s not that we have a particularly bad issue of that kind here, it’s just that they’re always in need and most of the time just getting by.

That’s all there is to it. Let them decide how to use the funds.

A guaranteed attempt

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What’s something you would attempt if you were guaranteed not to fail.

I think I’d like to do something a little silly with this prompt. A guaranteed unfailable attempt? I could say just about anything.

I could say I want to attempt to bowl a perfect 300 game, or make the world’s most perfect pastry. What if I said I wanted to attempt to discover the most efficient and stable source of near limitless clean energy and make it easy for anyone to produce so that greedy power companies can’t control it?

Maybe I’ll just take that perfect 300 game.

No shame in failing, only in giving up

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What was the hardest personal goal you’ve set for yourself?

I don’t set a lot of personal goals. For me they have a tendency to feel imposing and put a lot of pressure on me mentally. I mainly just focus on the idea of something being a normal, consistent part of my life so as to avoid all of that. That doesn’t mean I haven’t set any recently.

Two personal goals that are tied together that I set recently were participating in NaNoWriMo last year and trying to write on my blog every day for a few months.

I didn’t meet the word count for NaNo, but still made significant progress, and considering I was simultaneously working on my blog every day, I technically wrote a lot more. Combined, I still didn’t hit the word count goal, but that isn’t what is important. I learned a lot about how I approach writing stories versus my blog, and although I haven’t made significant progress on my stories since then, I haven’t stopped writing. I’m still picking away at the ideas from NaNoWriMo, building new ideas and running into new stories that I want to write, all while still doing these daily prompts.

I may have failed at hitting 50,000 words in one month (it really is challenging!) but I haven’t fully given up. NaNoWriMo is coming up quickly again, and I might see if I can do it this time. Even if I don’t, I do know that, at the very least, I’ve managed to hit an unspoken long term goal for my blog. Next week, October 14th, should be the one year mark of writing daily. With that in mind, it seems even more likely that I could succeed at 50,000 words for NaNo.

Let’s see where things go!